Wes DeVoe - On The Road Chapters 1, 2 and 3

Pg. 8: "...A western kinsman of the sun, Dean. Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds - what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

I chose this excerpt because I thought it built upon our discussion in class on Monday dealing with the poem. The author, Kerouac, expresses this idea that despite knowing that trouble exists, he still wanted to get the ball rolling and experience life. We talked in class about how there was a sense of mystery when going on a road trip, and I believe Kerouac is getting the itch to reveal what that mystery might be in this paragraph. Like with any profession, experience is necessary in most cases to have a successful career. By Kerouac proclaiming that he wanted experience the road with Dean, I felt like it was another way of saying that he wanted to be courageous and go through the hardships along the way in order to help him later on in life.

I noticed at the end of the paragraph, he said he knew that "pearls" would be handed to him. It made me wonder what exactly he was really expecting the pearl to be?

-Wes